Greetings from Pflugerville, Texas, where we are enjoying ourselves in this absolutely splendid home:
What is not-so-splendid is the cloud cover forecast, which I have been obsessively checking for the past week with more frequency than I look at stock quotes:
See, I planned this trip a long time ago. I was anticipating this eclipse for the past seven years (whereas the mass media started waking up to it about two weeks ago), and I did what I do for a living, which is look at historical data and try to make rational predictions about what would happen next.
In this instance, my goal was to simply determine the happy intersection between:
- eclipse totality and
- what part of the country would probably have clear skies
All data point to Texas. You know, dry, arid Texas? Blue skies? That place? And I figured if I was going to go to Texas, I might as well go to the mecca of cool, which is the Austin area. So that’s what everything was planned around: our residence, our rental car, our airplane flights, our dining reservations. The whole schmear.
As you know, God has decided it would be hilarious to completely envelope the United States during an incredible rare swipe of the country with a total eclipse. I mean, gosh, now we can experience the life-altering vision of seeing bright clouds get darker. That’s worth millions of Americans spending billions on travel plan, right?
I am not easily daunted, however, so I have already expressed to my compatriots that we will get up at any hour and drive any distance (well, *I* will) in order to find a hole in the sky. As of this moment, which is a full 30 hours before the eclipse, I am targeting northeastern Texas, pretty much near Texarkana, although these plans are at the mercy of the forecasts I will examine Monday morning.
Suffice it to say that, to the chagrin of my fellow travelers, I will be rousing the troops in the wee hours of the morning to relocate by car to any possible hole in the sky. What scares me to pieces is what comes after, because post-eclipse traffic is going to be apocalyptic, and I’ve already examined the airlines, who have kindly TRIPLED prices on all fights for the first few days of the week, just to ream the people who need to get from point A to point B.
I hope that, when this is all over, I am able to report success to you. Pray for me.
